January 15 marked three weeks since Christmas – two from New Year’s celebrations. Statewide hospitalizations have trended downward since Christmas and deaths more so, according to the Ohio COVID dashboard.
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Buses, a decommissioned ambulance, and lots of cars and trucks traveled through Richmond for hours on Monday afternoon as part of the Virginia Citizens Defense League’s (VCDL) Lobby Day 2021 demonstration. Most vehicles sported VCDL flags and decals; a few also waved Trump flags and other paraphernalia.
“When the first bus came, it just seemed like car after car after car, decked out, horns honking, people waving,” VCDL President Phil Van Cleave said. Car caravans came from all corners of the Commonwealth.
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A former Republican Senator from Tennessee who had a tumultuous relationship with President Donald J. Trump has resurfaced to bash the forty-fifth President in his final days in office, along with, by extension, those who support him.
“Look, there’s no one that feels more strongly about the fact that Republicans ought to celebrate some of the policy gains that have occurred, but never ever, ever allow someone like President Trump to serve again, certainly to become the Republican nominee or be president of the United States,” former Sen. Bob Corker (T-TN) told Knox News last week.
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University of Louisville professor Ricky Jones wrote in an op-ed that Republicans should “be forced to shut the hell up” about the Capitol Hill attack unless they denounce their former support of President Donald Trump.
“Republicans, you should not be allowed to speak about being shocked by President Donald Trump or the recent right-wing raid in Washington, D.C., for your words ring hollow,” wrote Jones, who is the chair of the Pan-African Studies department.
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What do George Floyd, Thanksgiving, and the Civil War all have in common? The publicly traded Scholastic Corporation has made a conscious decision to weave them into a twisted account of American History (their label) portraying our country as systemically racist, fundamentally flawed, and essentially evil. Articles written in their weekly Scholastic News Review are mandatory classroom reading and discussion for our children—6 million in total from first through sixth grade across the country, according to Scholastic.
During back-to-school week in August, these 6 million mostly elementary-age students were welcomed back with an article titled “Demanding Justice,” with the subheading: “Protests spread across the United States after a Black man is killed by police.”
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Missouri has become the first state in the U.S. where abortions are no longer performed.
A total of 45 abortion facilities closed or halted abortions nationwide in 2020, including in Missouri, which is now the only state without an active abortion facility, according to a survey conducted by Operation Rescue, a pro-life activist organization.
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Democratic Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin told CNN anchor Jake Tapper on Sunday that Senate members “have to follow their own conscience” on President Donald Trump’s impeachment.
Durbin told Tapper on CNN’s “State of The Union” that he doesn’t know how members of his own caucus will vote to convict Trump.
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Michigan State University recently highlighted linguistics professor Peter De Costa’s study about “linguistic racism.”
To explain the concept, De Costa cited the phrase “Wuhan virus” as an example.
The university’s official news service, MSU Today, interviewed De Costa following the publication of his study, “Linguistic racism: Its negative effects and why we need to contest it.”
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Puerto Rico has become a popular tax haven for super rich Americans who take advantage of local laws, which allow them to avoid paying U.S. federal income taxes.
Over the last decade, thousands of wealthy Americans have built homes, started businesses and spent a significant amount of time in Puerto Rico, all in order to take advantage of the island’s tax code that exempts them from U.S. taxes. While just a few thousand have taken advantage of the law, the U.S. federal government has potentially lost out on hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue, according to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
“It’s being done, in a sense, in plain sight,” Peter Palsen, an international tax expert at the Washington D.C-area law firm Frost Law, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “The IRS has the knowledge of who’s doing it.”
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The Trump administration on Wednesday announced a ban on imports of cotton and tomatoes from the Xinjiang area of China, where the government is detaining more than a million Muslim Uighurs in horrendous prison-like conditions where they are forced into labor, the US Customs and Border Protection announced.
Effective January 13 at all U.S. ports of entry, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) issued a Withhold Release Order against cotton products and tomato products produced in Xinjiang based on information on information that the Chinese Communist Party was using detainees for “prison labor” in reeducation camps.
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by Chuck Ross Alejandro Mayorkas, President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for secretary of homeland security, received $3.3 million last year as a partner at his law firm, where he represented a defense contractor accused of kickbacks to secure a Department of Energy contract and a utility company found responsible for an explosion that killed one person in Massachusetts. Mayorkas, who served as deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under President Barack Obama, also faced an investigation during the Obama administration regarding a visa program he oversaw as director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). A 2015 report from the DHS inspector general said Mayorkas “exerted improper influence” to help politically-connected Democrats navigate the EB-5 visa program, which awards green cards to foreigners who invest in American companies. Mayorkas was also accused in a House report in 2002 of “inappropriate” intervention on behalf of a Democratic donor who sought a presidential pardon from Bill Clinton. Mayorkas will appear before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Jan. 19 for his confirmation hearing. Mayorkas, who was a U.S. attorney in Los Angeles during the Clinton administration, joined Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, a prominent Big Law firm, after…
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In their latest entry in their litany of hypocrisy, the Democrats are trying assiduously to suppress the very opposition strategy they engaged in during the Trump Administration.
It is ironic, and in many instances unnecessary. By and large, Republicans and populists would never engage in many of these political tactics. Nevertheless, the Democrats are trying preemptively to extinguish a Republican-populist version of their “resistance” by using the execrable and rightly condemned Capitol riot as a pretext to equate legitimate “opposition” with treasonous “sedition.”
The Democrats’ “resistance” was no organic, spontaneous uprising. It was a well-orchestrated political operation. Knowing what they did to undermine the Trump Administration, the Democrats know what they must do to stop it from happening to them. In other words, there is a history lesson the Democrats are trying to rewrite.
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Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors member and lawyer Leslie Haley announced her bid for the Republican nomination in the 2021 Virginia attorney general election on Thursday.
Haley, who has represented the Midlothian District on the board since 2016 with stints as both the chair and vice chair, launched her campaign to be the Commonwealth’s top attorney through a press release and short video.
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The St. Paul City Council unanimously voted to approve the creation of a committee dedicated to researching reparations for descendants of slavery in order to engage in “racial healing.”
The resolution, which was approved during a Wednesday night meeting, names the new group the Saint Paul Recovery Act Community Reparations Commission. The main goal of the committee is to “make significant progress toward repairing the damage caused by public and private systemic racism in the City of Saint Paul.”
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U.S. Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA-10) said this weekend that right-of-center Georgians can defeat socialists and Marxists living within the United States and, at the same time, do so peacefully.
“As shameful and tragic as January 6 was, it does not change the fact that tens of millions of Americans believe the November 3 general election was fraudulent,” Hice said in an emailed newsletter to his constituents Friday.
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Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost took another swing Thursday at stopping provisions from controversial nuclear bailout House Bill 6 from impacting the state’s energy customers.
Late last year, Yost sued to stop ratepayer fees from being implemented that would have provided $150 million in money to Energy Harbor. Thursday, he filed a motion to stop FirstEnergy from executing another rate hike allowed in the legislation.
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On Wednesday, Michigan House Republicans kicked off the 101st legislative session by introducing a bill that seeks to prohibit lawmakers from voting on bills that could benefit themselves or their family members
“To say we’re living in challenging political times is an understatement. People just don’t trust their government or their politicians,” House Speaker Jason Wentworth, R-Clare, said in a Wednesday press conference.
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Two upcoming special elections scheduled next month will result in a new state representative and chief prosecutor. The race for House District 90 – which encompasses DeKalb, Henry, and Rockdale counties – will feature a slate of 7 Democratic candidates. The Griffin Judicial Circuit District Attorney race is bipartisan and much smaller, featuring only two candidates.
The list of candidates on the ballot for the state representative seat are exclusively Democratic because of the circumstances surrounding the previous representative’s departure from office. Representative Pam Stephenson (D-DeCatur) resigned last September due to medical issues; she’d served as representative for about 15 years. Her daughter, Taureaun Stephenson, acted as her power of attorney and submitted a resignation letter to House Speaker David Ralston (R-Blue Ridge). The next week, Governor Brian Kemp accepted her resignation.
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The National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC) is calling for Trump supporter Jose Feliciano Jr. to resign from Virginia’s redistricting commission. Feliciano is one of Republicans’ four citizen appointees, and is under fire for comments he allegedly made on Twitter.
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Attorney General candidate Delegate Jay Jones (D-Norfolk) has pre-filed a bill that would automatically reinstate felons’ voting rights after completion of their sentence. Governor Ralph Northam is also pushing for passage of the bill, HJ546.
“If you break the law in Virginia, you’ll be punished. But right now, part of the punishment follows you for the rest of your life—even after you’ve paid your debt to society. ” Northam said in his State of The Commonwealth address. “You lose your civil rights—like the right to vote—and you don’t get them back unless the governor acts to give them back.
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U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN-09) this weekend confirmed what he said a lot of people already suspected about him. Cohen said, yes, he hates Donald Trump.
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Justice Department officials have formally walked back the outlandish assertion that claimed protesters sought to “capture and assassinate elected officials” during the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol.
Michael Sherwin, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, told reporters during a press conference on Friday that there is no “direct evidence of efforts to capture or assassinate lawmakers” during the riot.
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Joe Biden may be gearing up for January 20, but it was January 2012 when the Delaware Democrat got his big break. “Biden Gets China,” headlined the January 2, 2012 report in The Atlantic. As author Steve Clemons explained, “a senior White House official has confirmed that Vice President Joe Biden will take the lead on the administration’s next phase China policy.”
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced an investigation into the content moderation policies of multiple Silicon Valley based tech companies after President Trump was permanently banned from Twitter last week.
Paxton’s office demanded four big tech giants such as Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Amazon and Google provide information relating to their censoring of conservative speech as well as their termination of the popular conservative social media app Parler from their platforms.
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Singer/songwriter Mira Goto grew up in a musical family. Her grandmother played the organ at church for many years and she learned to play the violin as a child. She grew up with access to instruments and a family who loved to sing.
As a teen, she thought the guitar was a much cooler instrument so she put her efforts there. Her favorite artist was Alanis Morrisette. “If I ever have the opportunity to do CMT Crossroads, she will be my first pick,” she mused.
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This week officials with the Tennessee-based Action 24/7 online sports betting company said that they, unlike their competitors, do not delay withdrawals or offer bonuses for players to cancel withdrawals. New Jersey officials, according to The Minnesota Star Tribune, this week threatened to act against sports book operators who ask customers to cancel requests to cash out money.
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The Senate Judiciary Committee on Friday released transcripts of 11 interviews conducted as part of an investigation into the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe.
The interviews were conducted with current and former FBI and Justice Department officials between Mar. 3 and Oct. 29, 2020, according to a press release from Sen. Lindsey Graham, who chairs the committee.
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Trader Joe’s is the latest business offering financial incentives to encourage their workers to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
The grocery chain said Thursday it will give employees two hours of pay per dose for getting the vaccine. The Monrovia, California based company said it will also shift around schedules to make sure employees have time to get vaccinated, according USA Today.
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If we’re going to be objective about it, we’ve got to give the Mark Zuckerbergs, Jeff Bezoses and Jack Dorseys of the world their due — the apps they’ve created are some of the greatest technological marvels in history.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday that congressional members may have to be prosecuted if they helped the Capitol rioters.
“If in fact it is found that members of Congress were accomplices to this insurrection, if they aided and abetted the crime, there may have to be actions taken beyond the Congress in terms of prosecution for that,” Pelosi said during a press conference at the U.S. Capitol Friday.
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Members of the Georgia House of Representatives have submitted a resolution that asks the U.S. Congress “to reject any and all actions to increase the number of justices on the United States Supreme Court.” Staff for U.S. Sen.-elect Jon Ossoff and U.S. Sen.-elect Raphael Warnock, both Democrats scheduled to soon represent Georgia in the U.S. Senate, did not return The Georgia Star News’ requests for comment on the matter.
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A freshman member of the state House of Representatives is working to pass legislation that would end the COVID-19 emergency order levied by Gov. Tim Walz (D).
“Last week, as you may know, I again introduced a resolution to End Walz’ Emergency Powers,” Rep. Erik Mortensen (R-MN-55A) said in a Saturday press release. “The effort failed on a party-line vote which was disappointing given 6 Democrats had previously voted to end the peacetime emergency.”
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COLUMBUS, Ohio – Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R) authorized 1,000 active Ohio National Guard (ONG) members Friday to assist federal authorities in Washington, D.C. Earlier in the week DeWine signed an executive order to activate ONG troops – estimating 200 would go to America’s capital city.
“The activation of additional Guard members follows a request from the U.S. National Guard Bureau Thursday evening for extra support,” read a statement released by the Governor’s communications team.
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Georgia’s lieutenant governor appeared on CNN to bash President Donald J. Trump Thursday, and urge the GOP to move away from him.
“The quicker we can move past Donald Trump – President Donald Trump – and move on as a nation and as a party … you know, I’m encouraged that the movement’s starting to build, and the GOP 2.0 that’s – you know, we should never, as a party, let a person be more powerful than our party,” Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R) told Poppy Harlow on “CNN Newsroom.”
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U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA-14) said this week that she is cosponsoring the Life at Conception Act and the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. Greene said this in a press release that members of her staff emailed Friday.
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Lobby Day, the annual tradition where Virginians from across the state gather in Richmond to engage lawmakers on pressing issues, is going to look quite different this year.
The Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL) Lobby Day 2021 is set to take place on Monday in Richmond, but this year, instead of a massive gathering of mostly armed individuals at the Capitol, the gun-rights advocacy group is organizing a car caravan through the heart of the city.
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The Virginia Department of Health (VDH) announced on Thursday that it is expanding its partnership with Walgreens to offer Abbott BinaxNOW rapid antigen COVID-19 testing for free at specific locations throughout the Commonwealth, according to a press release from the agency.
Before the expanded agreement only four Walgreens in the state were providing the drive-through tests, but now that number has increased to 15 select locations, the release said.
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Michigan’s General Fund and School Aid Fund tax revenues dropped $1.24 billion since January 2020, according to figures released Friday by state administrators and fiscal analysts.
The latest state consensus revenue estimating conference also projected an $84 million shortfall for 2021.
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The Republican Party of Virginia (RPV) State Central Committee (SCC) failed to clarify the nominating method for its 2021 candidates in a meeting Saturday.
SCC members voted again to approve a convention, making it contingent on passing an amendment allowing an unassembled convention based on Governor Ralph Northam’s COVID-19 restrictions. The convention nomination method was first passed by the SCC on December 6 by a 42-30 majority. On Saturday, the amendment got a 41-30 majority but less than the three-fourths approval required by party rules. The SCC tabled the issue until a future meeting, tentatively planned for next Saturday.
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Chesapeake doughnut shop Amazing Glaze was flooded with negative reviews and threatening phone calls after owner Mary Jane Hamblin’s husband attended the January 6 Trump rally in D.C. Although her husband was not involved in the subsequent riot at the capitol, internet reviewers attacked her business. But after media picked up the story, Amazing Glaze was flooded with customers and supporters.
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The National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) banned all “hate speech” by its members – not just in members’ professional capacity, but in every aspect of their lives. The policy changes were approved by the NAR Board of Directors during a meeting on November 13.
The policy on hate speech encompasses an array of broad issues: “harassing speech, epithets, or slurs based on race, color, religion sex, handicap, familial status, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity.” Collectively, these speech-related issues fall under what the NAR terms “public trust,” which also includes misappropriation of client or customer funds, or property and fraud that causes significant economic harm.
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A former Congressman from Tennessee set off an internet firestorm when he appeared on Fox News remotely Thursday, with a portrait of former Chairman of the People’s Republic of China and founder of the Chinese Communist Party Mao Zedong in the background.
Harold Ford Jr., a Democrat, represented Tennessee’s Ninth Congressional District for a decade, from 1997 to 2007. Now, he provides commentary frequently on Fox News.
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Donald Trump was impeached again on Wednesday, a week before leaving office in one of the great travesties of modern politics.
Here are reasons why the exercise proved a farce.
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A retired FBI supervisory special agent told the Star News Network that the Capitol Hill police officer, who shot unarmed Ashli E. Babbitt at close range Jan. 6, was not justified to use deadly force.
“Yes, it was chaotic, but that is why you wear a badge,” said Robyn Gritz, who was part of the FBI team that responded to the April 15, 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. “That’s why you carry a gun – you’re supposed to know that you can handle a crisis.”
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Friday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed counter-terrorism expert D.W. Wilber to the newsmakers line to outline the threat of China and how they infiltrate American institutions.
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Delivering in his final days on one of his last unfulfilled promises, President Trump is declassifying a massive trove of FBI documents showing the Russia collusion story was leaked in the final weeks of the 2016 election in an effort to counteract Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.
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The federal deficit in the first three months of the budget year is 60.7 percent higher than over the same time period as last year, a record-breaking $572.9 billion.
The deficit surged as a result of Congressional spending of $3.5 trillion in 2020 in response to the coronavirus, although critics note that spending on pork barrel programs that had nothing to do with the virus increased and also drove the deficit. At the same time, revenue declined because of ongoing state lockdowns.
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President-elect Joe Biden has tapped Dr. David Kessler, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration and a member of his coronavirus advisory board, to lead the nation’s vaccination effort, the transition team announced Friday.
Kessler, who will become the chief science officer of the COVID-19 response according to a press release from Biden’s transition website, led the FDA under Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He will be responsible for ensuring that Biden’s vaccination plan — which calls for 100 million vaccinations in 100 days — is successful.
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Various leftwing writers (some of them nominally Republican) have been salivating over the prospects of a GOP civil war.
Nothing would make them happier than the Republicans tearing themselves apart in a fight over President Donald Trump and the future of the GOP.
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The National Rifle Association announced Friday it was filing for bankruptcy protection and will be leaving New York with plans to reorganize in Texas.
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